By [email protected] (John Voelcker) The long, strange, sad saga of the now-defunct Volkswagen Phaeton will likely go down as an asterisk in VW’s long history. The pet project of now-departed VW Group chairman Ferdinand Piech, a member of the Porsche family that controls the carmaker, it was a $70,000-and-up luxury sedan from the German makers of the People’s Car. It shared…